1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to wireless transmission in a wireless network, and in particular, to an antenna sector discovery between peer stations using directional antennas in a wireless network.
2. Description of the Related Technology
Beam discovery (e.g., sector discovery) is the first step before exchanging data using directional antennas (or antenna arrays). A proposed amendment to IEEE 802.15.3 standard for Millimeter-wave based PHY layer specifies an Automatic Device Discovery (ADD) scheme for devices using directional antennas. The proposed ADD scheme assists in discovering the directional antenna that is used at a piconet controller (PNC) to directionally communicate with a station and vice versa. The ADD scheme suffers from the shortcoming that it does not assist in device-to-device (peer-to-peer) antenna discovery, e.g., which antennas should be used for data exchange between two stations when neither of them is a PNC.